About

Buri(ﾟ∀ﾟ)Hamachi (Japanese: ブリ(ﾟ∀ﾟ)ハマチ) refers to a series of MAD/hand drawn animated videos of characters dancing to an audio loop taken from a soundtrack CD album of a console role-playing game Ar tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel produced by Gust and Namco Bandai in 2010.^[1] Many cute animations in this series by amateur illustrators spread to the web through Nico Nico Douga (NND) and YouTube in early 2010.

Origin

The video game was released in Japan on January 27th, 2010 and its original soundtrack CD album was released on the previous day.

One of the features of this video game is an adaptive music generating system called "R.A.H" (Realtime Active Hymmnetics) system, which changes pitch, tempo, and melody of the battle BGM in realtime by user's "Song Magic" settings and character's stats. The soundtrack CD includes the song "EXEC_HYMME_BATTLESPHERE/.#Saki extracting", which is a battele theme song generated by "R.A.H" system for Saki, one of the main characters in this game.

However, game players hardly listen to this song itself in the game because it's almost impossible to generate exactly the same song twice by R.A.H system's complex parameter calculations.

Spread

What triggered the fad of the song, very cute and moderate but unfit to serious battles, was a simple hand drawn animation that an SD Saki danced while presenting Japanese amberjacks in each hands. This video was uploaded to NND on January 31st, 2010.^[2] Those fishes come from vocal phrases in the song, which sound like "Buri" (ブリ, Japanese Amberjack^[3]) and "Hamachi" (ハマチ, Young Japanese Amberjack). In addition, as a parody of the purge system that enables characters to power up by purging clothes, she put off hers at the end of loop.

This cute animated video got much attention and had been watched over 600,000 times in its first month.

Many other illustrators were also inspired by its quite convenient editing style which required only 8 illustrations. They soon began mimicking this easy-editing style, and making many kind of characters dance to this song.

The amount of those videos posted to NND by them had already increased to more than 600 in its first month, and is still increasing.^[4] Moreover, many of them are reuploaded to YouTube, and some westerners inspired by those videos have posted their own "Buri Hamachi" videos.^[5]

The explosive spread from that song's popularity in video series was reported by Japanese online news site ITmedia on February 19th of that year, though it was a small mention.^[6]

The Official Answer

Many of "song magic" vocal phrases by Saki sounds like food names. But none of them is mentioned in any official explanations. So, a user sent a question about "Buri Hamachi" to the developers, and got an answer below from Akira Tsuchiya, the director of Ar Tonelico series. It was posted to Q & A corner in the official website in the August of that year.^[7]

Q: What does Saki's song magic, in which "Buri Hamachi" can be heard, actually say?
A: It really says "Buri Hamachi".

Notable Examples

For more videos, check out the videos section in this entry.

Search Interest

External References

Editor’s Note: Registration is needed to browse the original videos listed in this section.